I know that the knock box has ignition mapping in it. I run fixed timing on my car. I found that the knock box was altering the timing when I did not want it to, and felt that it was an additional failure point that I did not want to leave in the system. My car is wired per the CIS-E Golf without knock sensing diagram in the Bentley shop manual.

The 4 window sensor provides enough resolution to control the spark timing for every single CIS-E/KE-Jetronic car that VW sold. I found that the 'scatter' of the spark timing reduced dramatically when I removed the knock box from the system.

I'll define 'better' between 4 window and 12 tooth setups with empirical testing for my car, as the better that I care about is one that impacts the performance/reliability of the system, and we may just not need the higher resolution.